ok under windows this is not an issue, grab the plugin for media player and away you go, but under linux there is no such plugin, can someone tell me where i can find such a pluggin, or what software i will have to compile to allow me to watch streaming video

You are looking to get the gstreamer packages. If you use any Debian based distro, just download the gstreamer packages from synaptic or aptitude. There are a lot of different codecs available, I chose to install all of them. Also, if you use Ubuntu, check out the Medibuntu repositories.

Once you have the codecs that can play the particular video, hit up the plugin for Mozilla. I use Totem as my media player, which in turn uses Gstreamer. The totem plugin is called totem-mozilla.

Oh, and I'd just like to add getting the plugins was much easier on Ubuntu than Windows. In Windows, I'd normally get a codec pack and install that. On Ubuntu, the file was opened, I was notified the codec wasn't available and if it should fetch them.